North Elementary Lose Your Favorite Things (Sit-N-Spin Records 2004)

With a lush layered sound that is timezones away from their previous lo-fi work this is a pretty, polished and nearly perfect disc. What we got here is moody guitar rock neatly augmented by sweet stylistic touches like Margaret White's violin on the loose but still crisply crafted sing-along "Teenage Wife" and T. Stone's "ba da-da ba" back-up vocals on the should-be single "Into You".

John Harrison's songs mostly speak softly but they can easily shift gears into edgy fuzz chord revelry. The merging of male/female harmonizing on "Chemicals" is hypnotic - every time the line "don't let those chemicals take you away from me now" is repeated it burrows deeper into one's sonic pysche. Catchy and cunning at the same time I would say.

Many instruments appear for cameos, some experimental song sculpting is present with even a little bit of the end-of-song fade out into a dissonant landscape of infinity that made many hate Wilco's last disc but as long as these sounds don't clutter or take the place of actual melody I'm fine with it. Guitarist Chris Bowman adds a cool instrumental track and C. Smoak pulls double duty by providing a great textured production. I quess I'm just saying I'm fine with everything 'bout this disc.

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